Comments on: The Origin of Big

By: The Origin of Big | The Loom | lloyd shepherd dot com

The Origin of Big | The Loom | lloyd shepherd dot com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:54:31 +0000

[...] The Origin of Big | The Loom | Discover Magazine Share this:EmailRedditDiggStumbleUpon ← “Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here.” The Big Muslim Problem! – The New York Review of Books → [...]

By: Before Leviathan | The Loom | moregoodstuff.info

Before Leviathan | The Loom | moregoodstuff.info — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:46:28 +0000

[...] to snarf colossal amounts of food. To do so, they swing open their toothless lower jaws, which inflate like a parachute with water. Then they haul their lower jaw shut again and then use a titanic tongue to push out a [...]

By: Recent Reading – 10/12/10 | Everyday Biology

Recent Reading – 10/12/10 | Everyday Biology — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:35:10 +0000

[...] Loom: The Origin of Big (on the evolution of [...]

By: Improbable Research » Blog Archive » The tale of the whale and the parachute

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 04:07:23 +0000

[...] writes Carl Zimmer in The [...]

By: Leviathan, the ancient marine predator discovered | A Schooner of Science

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 06:52:37 +0000

[...] big! The largest animal that has ever lived is the blue whale that is still in the ocean now. There are theories that the blue whale is as big as things will ever [...]

By: whaler

whaler — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:30:35 +0000

While lunge feeders are large, and the blue whale is a lunge feeder, let’s not forget that the sperm whale is not a lunge feeder, and is larger than most lunge feeders. A blue whale weighs up to 200 tons, but the fin whale is the second largest whale, and only weighs up to 65 tons. A sperm whale is similar in length and weight to a fin whale, an larger than most other lunge feeders. Lunge feeding does not seem like the only path. It has advantages, I am sure. By eating plankton, they have less concern about finding prey or prey escaping, for example. But big can come from other directions.

By: Giants Lurking In The Drawer | The Loom | Discover Magazine

Giants Lurking In The Drawer | The Loom | Discover Magazine — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:52:15 +0000

[...] Today, a number of big filter feeders swim in the oceans. Among sharks and their relatives, filter feeding has evolved a few times, in forms such as manta rays and whale sharks. Baleen whales evolved filter feeding as well, and have evolved into the biggest animals ever–perhaps the biggest animals possible. [...]

By: Announcing the posts that will be published in The Open Laboratory 2009! [A Blog Around The Clock] « The Swarm

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:44:15 +0000

[...] worry, it’s about beer!) from Bayblab. Brain and behavior of dinosaurs, from Neurophilosophy. The Origin of Bigfrom the Loom. Stripped, part II, the Aquiline Nose, by Anna’s Bones. Male chauvinist chimps [...]

By: Open Lab selections 2009 « Seeds Aside

Open Lab selections 2009 « Seeds Aside — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:49:25 +0000

[...] The Origin of Big from the Loom. [...]

By: fizzix » Lowest Energy State?

fizzix » Lowest Energy State? — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:35:16 +0000

[...] feeding that really captures the importance of scaling in biology, or more accurately zoology. This blog post on fin whale feeding mechanics seems to me to be a fresh and physical approach to an [...]

By: Ross Johnson

Ross Johnson — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:03:17 +0000

Interesting article, and interesting string of comments. This is my first time visiting this site, and I am impressed by the civility of the comments. I read a lot of political blogs and articles, and am always appalled by the rudeness of the people making comments. It seems that people have a hard time disagreeing without turning to name-calling, especially when there is no apparent consequence. Often the point of the article is lost while the commentators play tennis with insults.

Thanks to all of you for a great read.

By: Owlmirror

Owlmirror — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:07:25 +0000

Reading this reminded me of an interesting paragraph:

The big baleen whales pick their targets and engulf them with their giant jaws and extensible mouth/throat region. They are often feeding on swarms of krill that measure kilometers in extent. Rather than think of big whales as filter feeders, we should think of them as predators that take bites off of superorganisms that are hundreds of times larger. The fact that the krill are strained out of the water by the baleen is a matter of processing - it comes after the whale has taken a bite.

Taken from Tetrapod Zoology, Rorquals part III, but he's citing someone else.

By: Phlygian Tomb of Midas (Links) — ty.rannosaur.us

Phlygian Tomb of Midas (Links) — ty.rannosaur.us — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:10:54 +0000

[...] History – Bad teeth tormented ancient Egyptians (Discover Magazine). [...]

By: James

James — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:37:37 +0000

Why can whales grow larger than other marine life? Does breathing air somehow enable (or encourage) you to get bigger?

[CZ: Well, squid, extinct marine reptiles, and some other animals do get fairly big. The biggest whales, however, are lunge feeders. That suggests that lunge feeding might make such big sizes possible. It's a hypothesis that is now being tested with studies on fossils of whales.]

By: Article: The Origin of Big « Read It Or Not

Article: The Origin of Big « Read It Or Not — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:17:13 +0000

[...] The Origin of Big http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2009/11/24/the-origin-of-big/ [...]

By: tiger woods: the final word - Cool Married Guy

tiger woods: the final word - Cool Married Guy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:16:11 +0000

[...] troops to Afghanistan, whether or not global warning is real, the coming of lab-grown meat, how whales could possibly be so damn big, the cultural decline/collapse happening around us (while we fixate on celebrity bullshit), Leo [...]

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:08:18 +0000

John, if I may jump in here, there are at least a couple of possibilities. One is that the prey Shonisaurus was hunting down individually was typically large and abundant, thus providing a sufficient amount of energy to sustain a large body size. Another is that Shonisaurus had lower metabolic needs than any living cetacean, since reptiles have lower metabolic rates than mammals, and thus needed less food to sustain a comparable mass.

To turn this question on its head, another way of asking it is to wonder why Shonisaurus wasn’t bigger than a Blue Whale. That is, if it could get so big without the benefits of baleen and lunge feeding, why not get bigger still by developing it? The answer to this is probably related to the evolutionary pressures that led to the development of baleen and lunge-feeding for some whales, but not for Shonisaurus and its cousins. It might also be a metabolic thing: baleen might require vast amounts of energy to maintain that Shonisaurus just couldn’t provide without fundamentally changing is cellular physiology (that is, increasing it’s metabolic rate).

By: John Atkinson

John Atkinson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:02:05 +0000

If baleen whales could get that big only because they use lunge-feeding, what was the ichthyosaurs’ excuse? At 21 metres long and 60 tons, about as big as the average fin whale, Shonisaurus ties for second place in the all-time size stakes. But it had a skinny head, had a beak like a dolphin, and was shaped for speed like a dolphin. So it presumably chased down its prey like a dolphin too.

Pliosaurs only made it to 18 meters as far as we know, and were considerably skinnier (30 tons).

By: Sitez » links for 2009-12-01

Sitez » links for 2009-12-01 — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:30:45 +0000

[...] The Origin of Big | The Loom | Discover Magazine [...]

By: Brian Too

Brian Too — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:53:17 +0000

@Darren Garrison,

I’m a product presenter for WhaleOfADeal (ticker: WhoaDeal) Inc. and until I found Seabond, I had to turn down jobs! Now nothing can hold me back!!

(Sound of one flipper clapping)

By: Some whales double their weight when straining sea-water | Newsblog

Some whales double their weight when straining sea-water | Newsblog — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:03:40 +0000

[...] The Origin of Big [...]

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:55:20 +0000

p.s. Forgot to say: I really enjoyed the article!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:54:50 +0000

Carl, you say that as they get bigger animals are not usually scaled up versions of themselves, but that's being a little simplistic. There's a long running debate in animal morphology about exactly this notion, and, at least for mammals, the evidence seems to be that overall, larger species scale up isometrically relative to smaller species. That is, they're mostly scaled up versions of smaller species. Of course, the relative proportions and shapes of body parts do vary a lot, due to natural selection as you say, but overall size and shape seem to scale "geometrically." For instance, see Silva, "Allometric scaling of body length: Elastic or geometric similarity in mammalian design." J. Mammology 79, 20-32 (1998). And, this scaling holds for whales, too, for the most part. Actually, as whales get bigger, i.e., as we go from smaller species to larger species, they get bigger in all directions at basically the same rate, except that they do tend to get a longer slightly faster than they get wider, perhaps to reduce the drag on their enormous bodies.

By: Darren Garrison

Darren Garrison — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:41:03 +0000

If only whales could invent Poligrip Baleen Cream to avoid those embarrassing baleen accidents. Then they wouldn’t have to dive after it.

By: Gale McCullough

Gale McCullough — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:38:10 +0000

“Perhaps smaller whales can’t dive as deep to find the baleen, or something like that.” They are diving for plankton and small fish like herring, the baleen is what Zimmer describes here: “They swallow up water and filter it through fronds in their mouths called baleen”.

This is a photo of humpback baleen from the Humpback group on flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/natalielucier/3739824410/in/pool-megaptera

Our fingernails are made of the same material.

Large size thoughts:
First of all animals ocean animals don’t have to contend with gravity to the degree that land animals do so can get larger.

Isn’t there some advantage heat conservationwise to be large?